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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Rise from your Grave! (I)
Part one of my exegesis of Altered Beast.
Wednesday, 2004-09-08 | Classic Gin, Literature, Philosophy, Videogames
The premise and plot of the seminal beat 'em up Altered Beast are summarized on the back of the Sega Master System box thus:
You once were a Roman Centurion, a brave warrior who knew no fear. When you died on the battlefield with courage and honor, you thought you would know peace and rest for all eternity.To get caught up unnecessarily in the mythological referents is a mistake. The sort of 'saucy, pedantic wretch' (if I might bring an amorous John Donne to bear on the subject) who chooses to demonstrate his training in the classics by arguing that Pallas could never have been abducted by any god (so great was the power of the titan-forged bolts of her father that she was permitted to use) or that a Roman centurion (and thus, the player who takes up his role) would have known the storm-gatherer as Jupiter (rather than Zeus) has, in his attempt to mitigate the visceral appeal of this moving story for ends we may never understand, demonstrated only his ignorance.
But when the evil Neff, Lord of the Underworld, abducted the beautiful Athena, her father Zeus searched for a warrior strong and brave enough to rescue her. He chose you... and brought you back from the grave! And since you would be battling creatures of supernatural power, Zeus gave you supernatural power of your own.
Within certain of the enemy creatures were magical Spirit Balls. If you defeated those enemies and took the Spirit Balls, you would gain the powers of the Altered Beast... the power to transform into creatures of awesome strengths and abilities!
From man to strongman... to werewolf, weredragon, weretiger and the ultimate, the golden wolfman! You now had the power to do what no man living or dead had ever done before... battle the demons of the Underworld... and win!
In the distance you could hear Athena's cries. Zeus returned you to Earth at the graveyard in which you had rested. Waiting for you were the bizarre, twisted minions of the evil Neff. You began to fight harder than you had ever before... because in your first life your battle cry had been... "Never Say Die!"
To launch a pseudo-sophisticated attack on the mythological coherence of the summary as it is offered on the back of the box demonstrates (as if the world needed another demonstration beyond Plato's Protagoras) the dangers of thoughtless pedantry. The evil Neff, though he is here described as 'Lord of the Underworld,' a title that a novice might take to mean that he is either a proxy for Hades (Pluto), is in fact Neff--no suggestion is given by the authors that he is related to the Greek god of the underworld. Given only the text on the back of the box, we have no reason to doubt the authors' understanding of the mythology in question and so, we must assume, they chose to call their antagonist Neff because they knew that the kidnapping of Athena was beyond the powers of even the most powerful Olympians.
Neff, we may rightly assume, must be some foreign god--some malign paraclete not allowed for at the Olympian table who, as he lay dormant and plotting his revenge in the bowels of the algid world of the dead, has found some way (likely by guile) to avert the ardent wrath of Zeus and subdue the terrific might of Athena. Furthermore, the title 'Lord,' even when capitalized as it is, does not imply utter sovereignty over the 'Underworld.' Indeed, it was likely the desire of the authors to ward off the wrath of Neff that they chose the honorific in question--the ire of a god crafty or powerful enough to thwart the best efforts of the King of Heaven is not the ire one seeks to irk.
On the subject of a Roman centurion's name for the god who resurrects him, I refute the pedant hypothesized in earlier paragraphs simply by reminding him (with my index finger aimed squarely at the heavens) that the king of the Olympians was commonly known to the ancients as a god who was only interested in the pleasing scent of sacrifice offered to him--he cared not what men chose to call him.
No, it's not the apparently bungled (and in this document redeemed) mythology behind the story that makes the text interesting. It's the sheer humanity of the story--the grandeur of the narrative is such that, given proper exegesis, it is impossible to ignore.
And that exegesis, friends, is the task I shall set myself to in the coming days.
Tomorrow, I shall discuss the notion of resurrection and how the authors of the text of Altered Beast demand that we understand and identify with the exhumation of its protagonist.
The following night, sobriety permitting, I shall endeavor to support my grand thesis and central argument: that in the resurrection and transfiguration of the Roman centurion at the hands of Zeus, one sees the breadth of human experience laid out before him. Indeed, it is impossible to read the back of this box as anything but an exhortation to freedom and triumph over cruel tyrants and impossible odds; an exhortation heeded by many noble Romans and, indeed, all of history's heroes:
You began to fight harder than you had ever before... because in your first life your battle cry had been... "Never Say Die!"
